Demon

was beyond your science fiction to us. I had never even dreamed such things. And by the look on Lucifer’s face, neither had he.

“There were new and foreign bodies in the heavens now, too, their courses precharted for millennia to come. And the water, once dark and stagnant, moved by the pull of the new moon. I was instantly in love and left the others to walk by the muted light. I stood by the shore and watched the tides leave their skeletal treasures on the sand, lulled by the rhythm of a world that seemed to say, Be at peace; know that I Am. I longed for it, for all that was within it, and to be a part of it.”

We had turned off Memorial onto Mount Auburn, and I was gazing at the scratched Plexiglas divider between us, seeing in its surface the mottled white of the moon, when a Lexus abruptly cut in front of us. Lucian hit the breaks and flashed a distinct bird over the steering wheel.

“Don’t do that!” I said, alarmed. “For all you know he has a gun!”

“He doesn’t have a gun,” he said, and flashed it again. Some time after the car had sped on ahead, the demon continued. “These new celestial bodies took on great meaning to us. It was like watching the creation of an hourglass and all the sands within it. Sands within an hourglass are measured a closed set, a finite amount. And they were now set in motion. I would never look at the heavens the same; where I once saw the artful strew of El’s stars, I now saw the cogs and pendulum of a great clock, ticking the finite measure of time.”

“Who says time has to be finite?” I studied him in the rearview mirror. He had a faint scar against one temple, again suggesting a history that was not his. I wondered if it was the demon equivalent to designer jeans, faded and pre-ripped right off the hanger.

“Things with beginnings also have ends. The beginning of time is also the beginning of an end. And so that great hourglass to me was like your fabled Doomsday clock, ticking, ticking, every grain one in a too-limited series, the granule of an instant, passing and lost forever. I understood that things now and hereafter set in motion would be things of consequence, of inevitability. The passing of every moment since has disconcerted me. See the clock on the dash?” He tapped it. “You’re deaf to it, to the death of each second. But I am not.”

I had thought his fixation with time and timepieces a fetish until now. Now I thought I understood the preoccupation, the compulsive checking. Every timepiece I had ever seen him wear had been expensive. Was it that time was precious?

And to think that in the last year I had done nothing but pass time since my separation and divorce, tossing first days and then weeks and months at the iterant routine of work, of the T. Waiting out the pain, waiting for clarity and direction, waiting for the day that something shoved me from inertia.

And something had.

The demon was driving with one hand on the wheel, the other fingering his watch with more thoughtful delicacy than I would have thought those fingers capable of. “I didn’t understand it yet, of course. I was preoccupied, if unsettled. Each new day brought new wonders to Eden. The next day El spoke again, and the water swarmed—and so did the air.”

“Are you talking about fish—fish and birds?” I saw the distinct image of my own hands—small, as they had been when I was a boy—pasting animals onto a paper earth in Sunday school, something I had forgotten until this moment.

“Yes, and we had never seen anything like them. These were no spirit-beings but strange and alien creatures, swimming in the water and flying through the sky. So queer and diverse. Even Lucifer watched, stark eyed, beside himself with amazement. And I knew, with a vestige of that single accord that we had once shared, that he coveted this strange new world and all the things inside it. He had wanted to be a god, but in that moment I believe he remembered why he was not.

“But now, a stinging blow! El did something he had never done before: He blessed them. Never before had I heard such things spoken, even to Lucifer, and he had been the anointed one. Coveted words! And then, to these creatures, these base and strange new things, he gave license to create more of their own for as long and often as they dared. Imagine!”

In the rearview mirror I saw fever in his eyes.

“These were no gods—no spiritual beings even—these creatures. But they had been given the power to create.”

I had never seen him this emotional.

“We had no such power! They had been blessed. We had no such blessing. Can you understand?”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking how a firstborn must feel at the birth of a younger sibling—how I had felt at the birth of my sister when I was six years old.

“That day,” he said, at a stoplight now, his hand a fist on his chest, “another new thing sprouted, this time inside me, its roots embedded in the soil of my changed heart. By nightfall, jealousy had wound its tendrils through my innards, choking me from the inside. From Lucifer’s face I knew I was not the only one.

“And now, with the passing of another day, there came new creations more exotic than before, walking on legs, many of them without wings, roaming over the land. By any logic they should have been miserable—censored, condemned to swim, to roam on land without flying, to fly and not swim. I wanted them to be miserable. But they fascinated us with their strangeness and variety. And they ate things.”

He chuckled, but the sound was hollow. “Never before had we seen such a phenomenon. Terrible, fascinating —the devouring of green, living things for the sake of a too-mortal body. Mesmerizing. Horrifying. We watched them do it for hours, transfixed—mouthfuls of green, leaf and branch, fruit and seed, even the tiny plankton of the sea—all devoured by bodies with appetites we did not understand. So strange, so novel. We couldn’t get enough of it.”

I thought back to the coffee in the cafe, the scone at the bookstore, and the demon watching me. Even in the tea shop, he hadn’t drunk from his cup but watched me lift it to my lips so intently I had wondered if he had poisoned it.

“Yes!” He laughed. “So now you know why I will never tire of watching you consume things.”

This struck me as deviant as a foot fetish. “Then why don’t you ever eat?”

His expression slowly twisted. In the rearview mirror, I saw acid leak into his eyes. “Because it all tastes like the dirt you come from!”

I fell back against the seat, startled into silence as he drove on, eyes boring into the road before us.